Mainstream cancer treatments, which include radiotherapy and chemotherapeutic drugs, are known to induce oxidative damage to healthy somatic cells due to the liberation of harmful free radicals. In order to avert this, physiological antioxidants must be complemented with external antioxidants. Here the authors performed a preliminary phytochemical screen to identify alkaloids, saponins, flavonoids, polyphenols, and tannins in all parts of the Amaranthus spinosus Linn. plant. This paper describes the preparation of this crude extract and assesses its antioxidant properties for potential use in complementary cancer treatment.

Ant colony optimization algorithms simulate ants moving from point to point on a graph and coordinate their actions, similar to ants laying down pheromones to strengthen a path as it is used more frequently. These ACO algorithms can be applied to the classic traveling salesman problem, which aims to determine the lowest-cost path through a given set of points on a graph. In this study, a novel multiple-colony system was developed that uses multiple simulated ant colonies to generate improved solutions to the traveling salesman problem.

In this study, the authors develop an architecture to implement in a cloud-based database used by law firms to ensure confidentiality, availability, and integrity of attorney documents while maintaining greater efficiency than traditional encryption algorithms. They assessed whether the architecture satisfies necessary criteria and tested the overall file sizes the architecture could process. The authors found that their system was able to handle larger file sizes and fit engineering criteria. This study presents a valuable new tool that can be used to ensure law firms have adequate security as they shift to using cloud-based storage systems for their files.

This study aimed to determine whether artificial sweeteners are harmful to the human microbiome by investigating two different bacteria found to be advantageous to the human gut, Escherichia coli and Bacillus coagulans. Results showed dramatic reduction in bacterial growth for agar plates containing two artificial sweeteners in comparison to two natural sweeteners. This led to the conclusion that both artificial sweeteners inhibit the growth of the two bacteria and warrants further study to determine if zero-sugar sweeteners may be worse for the human gut than natural sugar itself.

In this study, the authors assess the factors that allow some speedcubers to solve Rubik's Cubes faster than others.

Nosocomial infections acquired in hospitals pose a risk to patients, a risk compounded by resistant microorganisms. To combat this problem, researchers have turned to bioactive compounds from medicinal plants such as the widely used neem. In the present study, researchers sought to determine the effectiveness of different neem preparations against several hospital acquired human pathogens. Neem powder in water successfully inhibited microorganism growth making it a potential agent to combat these infections.

Cardiac autonomic and structural changes may occur in temporal lobe epilepsy patients and contribute to the risk of sudden unexpected death in epilepsy patients. Choi and colleagues reviewed clinical charts to obtain patients’ lifetime seizure count, antiepileptic drug use, and history of heart disease, followed by transthoracic echocardiogram to calculate left ventricle dimensions, ejection fraction, and left ventricle mass. By comparing epilepsy patients to control subjects, they found that epilepsy patients had thinner left ventricle walls and smaller ejection fraction, but with no significant difference in left ventricle mass.

Cuisine with hot chili peppers can be tasty, but sometimes painful to consume because of the burning sensations caused by the capsaicin molecule. The authors wanted to find the palate reliever that decreases the burning sensation of capsaicin the most by testing water, soft drink, olive oil, milk, and ice-cream as possible candidates. The authors hypothesized that olive oil would be the best palate reliever as it is non-polar like the capsaicin molecule. The authors surveyed 12 panelists with low, medium, and high spice tolerances and found that across all levels of spice tolerance, milk and ice-cream were the best palate relievers and soft drink the worst.

The authors found that SARIMAX-GARCH is more accurate than SARIMAX for load forecasting with respect to energy consumption.

In this study the authors develop an app for faster chess game entry method to help chess learners improve their game. This culminated in the Augmented Reality Chess Analyzer (ARChessAnalyzer) which uses traditional image and vision techniques for chess board recognition and Convolutional Neural Networks (CNN) for chess piece recognition.